Hi, I found this game a couple weeks ago and extremely love it. Its challenging random, relaxed, and humorously unforgiving. Especially the gods.

I haven't made it to the later stages very easily completing all quests except halfling Ho ( halfling hell more like D: ) and am currently stuck on the later stages. Halls of Steel, Rock Garden, and Ick Swamp are currently what I'm trying to beat, and am coming nowhere near close to clearing the bosses of these respective stages- the indomitable made me laugh and cry at the same time.

One of the biggest problems with my play is understanding the gods and the apparent learning curve I apparently missed while playing the lowers levels, and while trying to use them effectively i tend to waste tiles or break a rule and still not be able to succeed. I know people can use them effectively, but my question is how to use them well, or they even more highly situational on map proximity than items? Are the later stages beatable without them?

Any tips on using gods, or understanding them better would be beneficial, and I feel this one field is the most needed to be, not changed, but somehow explained a bit easier or clearer. The gods are unforgiving.

Great game though. Some guy on a forum mentioned this game so I gave it a try, and even after (I believe it was the) alpha version I was sold.

Thanks for reading, RobPS- Wheres a link to your forums from this page- http://www.desktopdungeons.net/ , I hope im missing something, I have to go to my email when buying the beta to access these forums.

There's a link to the forum from the FAQ I believe, but it does need to be done better... When I get time

The latest patch reduced the difficulty of some of those dungeons, and added their VICIOUS versions again once you've completed their initial incarnations. Gods are tricky, that's kinda the point. There will eventually be puzzle scenarios that "teach" more god tricks.

Have you unlocked Dracul yet? The evil god of undead is probably our more powerful deity in the current pantheon. The only issue with Dracul is piety; he's really stingy with piety and his boons get really expensive. The best tactic is to begin by worshipping a piety farm god. Taurog works best for most classes, but Mystera and Tikki Tooki also work well. Once you have 80-100 piety, convert over to Dracul. Aside from Tikki's Edge, I'd advise avoiding the boons of Mystera and Taurog. They're not terrible, but for most classes the tradeoff is a little steep and you're much better off just taking the 50% piety penalty and converting to a god with better boons.

That god is Dracul for most characters. With enough piety, you can easily get +6-8 mana but without the nasty penalty of raising enemy resistances. You can also get +20% to resists, which compares very favourably against the 2 inventory slots and 4 points of mana you'll need to sacrifice to get +15% to resists with Taurog. None of that doing it for you? Then there's the eternal fallback "blood swell" which is a reliably way to cash out your piety in the end-game boss battle. To top it off, Dracul offers Blood Curse and Blood Tithe. These are 11th hour emergency piety options that should be reserved for the boss battle.

A good tactic with Dracul is to use blood tithe and healing potion conversion to gain piety, and blood power to gain mana. This essentially allows you to trade hit points for mana. Especially on the hard and vicious dungeons, the bosses will often 1-hit-KO your character so your only way to attack them is BURNDAYRAZ and CYDSTEPP, which makes your hit points and healing potions irrelevant. Dracul offers you a way to trade off those useless assets into useful mana.

For the Rock Garden, my preferred approach is an Elf Paladin. This allows me to build up lots of mana through conversion, and thanks to his physical resist and HALPMEH glyph I can cleave my way through the magic-resist boss with physical attacks. I use my healing potions here and avoid using mana potions. I then go to Dracul and convert HALPMEH and all my health for piety which I use to get extra mana. I then I walk up to the magic resist boss and wail away one him with BURNDAYRAZ until one of us is exhausted. For the record, when I did my initial Rock Garden run I hadn't even unlocked Dracul yet, so this combo isn't necessary to win.

Ick Swamp is a little nasty. My recommendation is the Orc Rogue, the game's ultimate glass cannon. If you can, prepare a Trisword and extra attack boosters as your preparation. It's CYDSTEPP or bust; if you cannot find this glyph then you're pretty much screwed. If you can find CYDSTEPP, the goal is to use it instead of hit points. The Orc Rogue deals so much damage that few enemies will be able to outlast him. If you can use Dracul to boost your mana, all the better (remember, pissing off Dracul with CYDSTEPP is meaningless since all he does is reduce your maximum health... which you've already reduced down to negligable amounts through Blood Tithe).

Halls of Steel is much easier in its hard incarnation than its vicious incarnation (20 layers of death protection on the boss as opposed to 50). You have a couple options. One is to use a monk equipped with poison and his excellent damage reduction to try to outlast the boss. The boss doesn't regenerate health thanks to poison, the monk has a quick-healing class feature to make good use of scarce remaining tiles, and with a few supplemental shots of BURNDAYRAZ or HALPMEH he'll go down. Another tactic is to use a Sorcerer equipped with the bear mace. Technically, the mana shield of the sorcerer and knockback of the bear mace are all separate attacks, which means that the Indomitable loses three layers of death protection from each blow. If you have the burning heart, I've also found a Bloodmage has no problems whittling down the hard-mode indomitable, but I suspect you don't have this item.